The latest news is that Lutfur Rahman appears to have lost his latest attempt to overturn a Labour Party decision to prevent his becoming its mayoral candidate. It was reported earlier today by both Ted Jeory and the East London Advertiser that an attempt at the High Court to block yesterday's NEC decision to replace him with Helal Uddin Abbas has been unsuccessful.

His selection victory of 4 September suddenly seems a long time ago. One of the small curiosities that followed that short-lived triumph was the public responses of the two Tower Hamlets MPs. Jim Fitzpatrick, his very public foe, gritted his teeth and pledged his support. But Rushanara Ali, unless I've missed something, did not. The pair have not been pals since around the time that Ali was picked to fight Bethnal Green and Bow. It now appears that she was a big influence behind the NEC's move against Rahman.

An account of yesterday's the NEC proceedings published by one of its members Christine Shawcroft reports Labour's general secretary Ray Collins saying that along with Abbas's complaints about the selection process:

There is also the issue of intimidation, some of which happened at the Labour Group meeting last night. Party officers met senior party members from the Borough, including Rushanara Ali MP, who said that allegations about Lutfur's conduct had been made before, and that during the Parliamentary campaign he had publicly refused to support her as a candidate.

I'm told that mayoral salary and advisers were among the topics discussed at that meeting and that it was an emotional affair. I've also been told by a well-placed Labour source that the pre-NEC meeting expectation had been that Rahman would be endorsed rather than dumped by the NEC and that this had remained the case until at least the latter part of Tuesday afternoon. If all that is so, then yesterday's dramatic events might well have been to a significant degree a case of last straws and camels' backs rather than the clinically co-ordinated conspiracy against Rahman that some suspect.

I've also had a chat with NEC member Peter Kenyon, who was happy to confirm Shawcroft's version of events - he and others were invited to comment on it before it was released - and to express the view that the decision to de-select Rahman was "another example of the institutional folly of Labour in ignoring natural justice." He added that, "to impose the complainant [Abbas] in the original candidate's place seems to me absurd."

It might also seem unfair to John Biggs who, after all, finished second in members' selection poll, pushing Abbas into third place. Two NEC members voted for Biggs to be imposed as candidate, but 16 voted for Abbas, who is the current Council leader. Five, including Kenyon, abstained. Shawcraft's account concludes:

My suspicion is that they put forward Abbas so as not to leave themselves open to the charge of deselecting a Bangladeshi and replacing him with a white man. All papers in the dossier were collected in, and I left the meeting.

The papers in the dossier were, by the way, Abbas's complaints, submitted by his solicitors, and the Labour Party's legal advice about its position.

There's plenty more that could be said - and is being said elsewhere - about the NEC's decision, both for it and against it, and what its wider implications are going to be: one looks likely to be that Respect will run a candidate after all, possibly George Galloway, having previously backed Rahman instead. But for now I'll leave Ted Jeory to provide some of the intimate local history and sign off with one thought. The more homework I do about the Tower Hamlets political scene, the more confident I am that reducing it to some sexy-sexy tale of scary-scary Muslims secretly plotting to turn the East End into an Islamic mini-state does it no justice at all.

Update, 22 September 11:11 The ELA reports that Lutfur Rahman will run as an independent. Will this mean the NEC investigation into alleged irregularities in the selection process won't be pursued? Does it already mean that Respect won't be standing a candidate after all but will support Rahman instead, as it had said it would when he become Labour's candidate? Yes to both, I'd guess.